Zayn’s “Vibez,” vibe neoliberalism, & sexuality
This was originally published on February 19, 2021 on my Substack newsletter. I’m republishing it here to get this post on my platform. (Never trust platforms you don’t own.) If you would like to support the work I do (I don’t get research funds now that I’m not faculty), I’m running a sale on newsletter subscriptions: a year for $24. Offer is good until 23 February 2024.
With its smooth, almost mumbly vocals over a looped 4-count beat composed of a syncopated bass drum, hand claps on 2 and 4, and closed hi hats on most of the 8th notes, Zayn’s 2021 track “Vibez” is a riff on the “lofi beats” style popularized by YouTube channels such as Chilled Cow. The style of vocal delivery and lyrical content are a PG echo of Ariana Grande’s “positions,” making “Vibez” a very 2021 slow jam. Although the lyrics suggest a relationship that has definitely gone somewhere, the music stays put. Sonically, “Vibez” is more an affective sous vide than a burning, feverish passion. Because it combines lofi aesthetics, gen z “vibes” discourse, and discussions of sexuality and sexual desire, studying “Vibez” as a work of popular music reveals crucial dimensions of the sexual politics of vibes capitalism/speculative neoliberalism.
Traditionally, Western music uses rising musical tension to mimic climactic passions and sexual climax (this is a point Susan McClary makes in 1991’s Feminine Endings.) Take, for example, the swelling strings when Han and Leia kiss in Return of the Jedi–if John Williams is using this device in this movie, you know it’s firmly ensconced in Western musical traditions. Or, more recently, the huge soar in Rihanna’s “We Found Love.”
The notable thing about “Vibez” is that it lacks anything resembling a climax. There is little in the way of tension-release, builds, or risers. As you can hear in “We Found Love,” it’s conventional for songs to put their biggest musical climax about ⅔ of the way through in a section that breaks from the verse/chorus structure. “Vibez” has a very loose verse-chorus structure (more on that shortly) complete with a section that breaks from the established structure, but it approaches this section very differently than in “We Found Love”:
(X = 1 4-bar phrase)
X (intro)
X
X (chorus)
X
X (verse 1)
X
X (pre-chorus)
X
X (chorus)
X
X (bridge/break)
X
X (pre-chorus)
X
X (chorus)
X
The percussion drops out entirely for the first half of the bridge, and once it returns on the downbeat of the second four-bar phrase, the texture gradually gets a bit more complex leading up to the end as an additional layer of melismatic background vocals is added into the mix. The only real development in the song happens at the level of texture, and it’s very, very gentle. As you can see from the chart above, the song is mostly repetitions of the pre-chorus and chorus; its structure backs away from the contrasty quite-LOUD-quiet form popularized by The Pixies and Nirvana. Like a proper sous-vide, “Vibez” mostly stays at the same temperature throughout.
Malik’s vocal performance assists in regulating the temperature. Like a DJ crossfading between records, the first phrase of the chorus lands on the downbeat of the second phrase as Malik emphasizes the titular word, “vibes,” just as the last word of the pre-chorus (“waiting”) lands on the downbeat of the first bar of the chorus. Transitions between song sections are thus smooth as can be, a true sonic sous-vide.
All these temperature metaphors I’ve been using are deliberate. It’s common to frame sexual attraction, sexual passion, and the like, in terms of heat. There’s Peggy Lee’s classic “Fever” and countless songs who likewise use fever as a metaphor for sex and sexual attraction. It’s common to talk about “burning” passion (like that “I burn for you!” exchange in season 1 of Bridgerton), or about people having “chemistry” (fire is a chemical process after all!). “Vibez,” however, uses “vibe” in place of chemistry to describe the mutual attraction and desire between Malik’s narrator and his addressee. In a chemical reaction (such as a fire), the various chemicals interact in ways that change their structures and produce new chemicals (and sometimes heat) as a result. Think of baking soda and vinegar or diet Coke and Mentos, for example: the two chemicals interact to produce an explosion of foamy, gassy mess. As a metaphor for sexual attraction, chemistry frames attraction as the “heat” produced by a chemical reaction. Replacing chemistry with vibes, Zayn’s song reframes sexual attraction in terms of sympathetic resonance instead of heat (I talk about vibes and sympathetic resonance here). Here, attraction is less about heat than it is about activation–sympathetic resonance is when the reverberations from one body (like a string) activate harmonics of the same frequency in other bodies.
In her book on the connection between neoliberal models of the market and biopolitical models of life, Melinda Cooper uses the contrast between heat-generating combustion and attuned activation to describe the difference between Fordist understandings of the laboring human body and neoliberal understandings of regenerative (human) capital. As Cooper explains, Fordism (i.e., assembly-line mass production) held “a common principle of production or labor—muscles perform mechanical work through the combustion of nutrients, just as the steam engine produces energy by burning carbon. The physico-chemical labor of the body was measurable in the same terms as that of heat…And this equivalence meant that the performance of the machine and of the body could be subjected to similar strategies of regularization and even reproduction” (Life as Surplus, 107). The calorie was a unit that measured heat as a way to standardize production and productivity. Whereas the aim of Fordism was disciplined industrial standardization, neoliberalism aims for non-standardized, irregular, reality-defying growth. Cooper’s point in the book is to argue that this idea of reality-defying market performance is grounded in/analogous to ideas of cellular regenerativity common in millennial biomedicine. For example, in the field of tissue engineering, scientists “wor[k] with and exploi[t] the active responsiveness of living tissue, its power to affect and be affected and thus to change in time” (113). This responsiveness is analogous to sympathetic resonance–it’s a tissue’s capacity to activate and be activated. And such responsiveness isn’t measured by heat or temperature, but in terms of “the threshold conditions under which an ensemble of cells, defined by certain relations, will self-assemble into a particular form and tissue, with particular qualities” (113). In other words, the aim isn’t to standardize production across various contexts (human and machine, for example), but to maximize the capacity for self-activation.
Neoliberalism compels us to understand ourselves as managers of our human capital rather than as laborers. So, instead of thinking of ourselves as laboring and producing heat (or alienable surplus value), we imagine ourselves as cultivating our capacities to activate the full spectrum of capacities within our human capital. Switching out “chemistry” for “vibes,” “Vibez” attunes itself to this shift in how markets produce surplus value and the structures of subjectivity that go along with this new paradigm. And this shift in markets activates a shift in how sexual attraction and pleasure is imagined and experienced: not as burning passion, but as activation of affect.
Risk-management is central to accumulating and maintaining human capital. You’re supposed to take risks big enough to be wildly profitable, but not avoid risks that would activate the wrong kinds of capacities. Activation can be good or bad; as Cooper emphasizes, infinite regenerativity is good when it happens in the right kinds of cells (like embryonic stem cells that scientists experiment with and from which they develop patentable therapies), but it’s bad when it happens in the wrong kind of cells (either literal cancerous growth or the figuratively cancerous growth of the Gamestop stock price, which put the rewards of that virality in the pockets of people who weren’t elite traders).
This idea of risk-management is key to unpacking how the video shapes the meaning of the song. As the one-man-show video hints, the song was written and released at a time when COVID-19 made physical intimacy with people who aren’t part of your household is exceptionally risky and most governments in the West forced individuals to privately assume all responsibility for that risk (much as the Reagan administration did during the AIDS crisis of the 80s). Whether accompanying risky physical intimacy or soundtracking a fantasy about a post-pandemic hookup, “Vibez” exists in a social context where sexuality is primarily regulated not through object-choice (e.g., we never get a clue about the gender of Malik’s narrator’s affections) but through individual resilience. Physical intimacy isn’t a bad risk when you can physically and economically afford to overcome any health setbacks that might come from extra-household physical intimacy. And for those strong enough to overcome their year-long deprivation of physical intimacy, the song is a rewarding activation of sexual fantasy. The song’s affective sous-vide expresses or represents the experience of never letting things get dangerously hot in a way that would ruin the goods getting cooked. Moreover, the song’s chill, lo-fi vibe represents the position of someone who doesn’t need to resiliently create feedback-loops of ever-amplifying human capital. Lofi study beats are ergonomic devices designed to keep knowledge-workers focused and productive. The point is to maintain an already well-developed bundle of human capital and help it navigate otherwise tumultuous circumstances…just as a sous-vide machine keeps cooking temps steady for optimal performance.
From its chill vibe to its reframing sexual attraction and pleasure as activation rather than combustion, “Vibez” is an evocative window into the ways speculative neoliberalisms are reshaping everything from structures of subjectivity, discourses of sexual attraction and pleasure, and pop songwriting. Vibes don’t combust, they resonantly activate other vibes. And that activation is good or bad (remember, the original meaning of consonance and dissonance in ancient Greek philosophy is tied to notions of obedience and subordination) depending on its potential to amplify the wealth/private property of the people neoliberalism is designed to advantage.